Western Digital HGST Unleashes 8 and 10 Terabyte Helium Hard Drives

One day, we'll think back on the concept of a 8TB hard drive and scoff at how puny it sounds. But that day is not today. Today, shipping a 8TB hard drive is an impressive feat, and it is one that has been accomplished by HGST. The storage outfit has just commenced shipments of its 8TB and 6TB HelioSeal platform HDDs, with a path already defined to get these to 10TB very soon.

The announcement came as a part of five other introductions, including the release of HGST Virident Space, which allows clustering of up to 128 servers and 16 PCIe storage devices to deliver one or more shared volumes of high performance Flash storage with a total usable capacity of more than 38TB. There's also its NVMe-compliant Ultrastar SN100 PCIe SSD series, which will be offered as a HH-HL add-in card, as well as a standard 2.5-inch drive form factor, with industry-leading capacities up to 3.2TB.

The real kicker is the 8TB Ultrastar He8, which is its second-gen helium-filled HDD. It's designed for intense data center use, and it requires less cooling (making it ideal for ambient data centers). Based on mainstream perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, the Ultrastar He8 can be deployed into any application or environment without tradeoffs in performance or device compatibility. The drives are currently being qualified by leading companies such as Netflix, Huawei, Inspur and Promise Technology as well as other top OEMs and cloud customers around the world.

Just in case that's not quite sizable enough there's the world's first data center-class 10TB HDD, which combines HelioSeal tech and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). The additive nature of these two technologies enables the future design platform for HDDs in delivering higher capacity points at accelerated time-to-market entry. It also provides the foundation for all future scaling technologies, putting HGST on an accelerated path to delivering high capacities into existing and future form factor designs. These units are sampling now, which means that a ship date shouldn't be too far behind.
clustering of up to 128 servers and 16 PCIe storage devices to deliver one or more shared volumes of high performance Flash storage with a total usable capacity of more than 38TB. - See more at: http://www.hgst.com/press-room/press-releases/HGST-unveils-intelligent-dynamic-storage-solutions-to-transform-the-data-center#sthash.YvrrjD65.dpuf